All posts tagged writing

There’s no substitute for the love of language, for the beauty of an English sentence. There’s no substitute for struggling, if a struggle is needed, to make an English sentence as beautiful as it should be. – Harper Lee

I tried to create a character who represented the everyman figure out of the medieval morality plays. It’s that simple. It’s the great advantage today of having a classical education: almost no one else does. It doesn’t exist anymore. So I’ve been taking plots from Milton, Shakespeare, Elizabethan theater, Greek mythology and the Bible for years and nobody notices! – author James Lee Burke (when asked why he thinks readers connect with Dave Robicheaux)

That summer, Daddy went from telephoning and dynamiting fish to poisoning them with green walnuts. The dynamite was messy, and a couple years before he’d somehow got two fingers blown off, and the side of his face had a burn spot that at first glance looked like a lipstick kiss and at second glance looked like some kind of rash.

At its best, the sensation of writing is that of an unmerited grace. It is handed to you, but only if you look for it. You search, you break your heart, your back, your brain, and then — and only then — is it handed to you.

Someone out there is now accusing me of being tiresome and anal-retentive. I deny it. I believe the road to hell is paved with adverbs, and I will shout it from the rooftops. To put it another way, they’re like dandelions. If you have one on your lawn, it looks pretty and unique. If you fail to root it out, however, you find five the next day . . . fifty the day after that . . . and then, my brothers and sisters, your lawn is totally, completely, and profligately covered with dandelions. By then you see them for the weeds they really are, but by then it’s-GASP!!-too late.
– Stephen King on Writing A Memoir of the Craft

Here’s the deal: Most typewriter fonts are what are called monospaced fonts. That means every character takes up the same amount of space. An “i” takes up as much space as an “m,” for example. When using a monospaced font, where everything is the same width, it makes sense to type two spaces after a period at the end of a sentence to create a visual break. For that reason, people who learned to type on a typewriter were taught to put two spaces after a period at the end of a sentence.

One Space After a Period–The New Way

But when you’re typing on a computer, most fonts are proportional fonts, which means that characters are different widths. An “i” is more narrow than an “m,” for example, and putting extra space between sentences doesn’t do anything to improve readability.

annual Writers Workshop sponsored by the Seguin-Guadalupe County Library Friends of the Library

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Creativity takes many forms and each of us has a spark of creative expression. The Seguin-Guadalupe County Library under the guidance of Vice President Jolly Ann Ellis, hosted a Writers Workshop – and I envision this as only the first of several workshops. It was a great morning!

The creative energy was palpable and the ideas flowed.

Brandi Midkiff, Sandra Gravitt and Shaun Ford spoke about the different aspects of writing and those in attendance shared examples of personal writing. It was exciting and it was stimulating.

Texas

spirituality

spirituality

spirituality
The spiritual life is not a special career, involving abstraction from the world of things. It is a part of every man's life; and until he has realized it, he is not a complete human being, has not entered into possession of all his powers."
~ Evelyn Underhill

we yearn

Richard Foster
We today yearn for prayer and hide from prayer. We are attracted to it and repelled by it. We believe prayer is something we should do, even something we want to do, but it seems like a chasm stands between us and actually praying. We experience the agony of prayer-lessness.